your mouth is caked with the earth
by tonberrys
Summary: Before her bending gave her sight, Toph was in the darkness. Through taste and texture, she tried to put together the pieces.


Written for the 2017 ATLA/LOK Pro-Bending Competition, Round 3 (Addiction).  
 _White Falls Wolfbats - Firebender_

Main Prompt: Addiction to eating inedible things  
Additional Prompts: Toph, Disgust  
Word Count: 838

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 **your mouth is caked with the earth**

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In darkness, there is disconnection, and in disconnection, isolation. Within a world of shadows, there is only what you (feel, touch, smell, hear, taste) with your (heart, skin, nose, ears, tongue). Some endless stretch of black would swallow your paths, take possession of your agency, feast upon your spirit-

-if you allow it to.

Toph was always in the darkness, but she was not disconnected. Toddling into the garden, tiny fingers grasped the cool grass, ripping it from the ground with the subtlest snap. Between her teeth, the blades would grind, bitter on her tongue and telling of _grass_.

"That's disgusting!" Her mother's shrieks always came when she was exploring. She could feel hands moving her limbs like some lifeless ragdoll, could feel her curiosities pried from her little balled fist.

She was always taken inside, then. Mouth washed, clothes changed - and in gentle tones her mother would remind her of her delicate state, of dirt and dangers and illnesses and poisons just waiting to afflict her. Toph heard with her ears but not with her heart, felt the silks of her dress and the grainy strand of grass still stuck in her teeth. (She could not see without her fingers, without her feet, without her mouth-)

Silk was smooth, tougher yet somehow softer to chew on. Her mother did not much like that, either.

There was control in little rebellions, in the taste of dust, the stringy consistency of hair, the soft cush of a towel between her teeth. Even when the taste was terrible, the connection to the world was addicting, drawing her to explore beyond her supposed 'limitations.' They wanted her to be soft, to be still and compliant and unseen (and to _unsee_ the world as she experienced it through her senses). They forbade her explorations just as they forbade her bending.

They wanted her to be blind.

It was outside, sitting criss-cross in the dirt, that Toph felt safest and most connected to her world. She could smell the flowers of the Beifong estate, could run her fingers along the maze of bushes, could feel the slight give of a small branch between her teeth (as much as curiosity as a growing habit).

"Is she eating that stick?" The man's voice was unfamiliar, most likely some official visiting their estate as a guest for her father. Immediately, the little girl paused and listened.

The embarrassment was evident in her father's voice when he spoke. "She's blind, you know. Sometimes she puts things in her mouth without realizing. She's still so small, of course, all children grow out of such things."

"Yes, of course," the unfamiliar man was saying, though Toph was past the age of infants and their oral fixations. "All children do."

When the man had left, her father instructed her to stop, told her it was not befitting of a little lady, that she was going to hurt herself if she kept putting everything she came across in her mouth.

Toph tried to close her senses as she might close her eyes, to resist the urge to nibble the hems of her sleeve or taste the earth on her tongue. Polite company would not accept her fixation, she knew all too well from her parents' consistent reprimands, and in polite company, she was quiet. Still. Blind. Yet in the quiet of the night, or when it seemed her parents were too busy to pay her much mind, Toph seized the opportunity to explore and experience.

The night she ran away to the badgermoles, the world opened up to Toph in an entirely new way. They were blind like she was, but it was through the pads of their clawed feet that they were granted sight. It was their bending that painted the surroundings in reverberating hues and allowed their feet to see as clearly as any creature who saw with its eyes. With her bending came a sense of security, independence, inclusion in the world around her. Each new skill developed under the care of her new friends added more color in her mental palette and more textures to the swiping brushes in her mind.

For some time, her senses had struggled to pull together a sense of the world. In the darkness, Toph fixated on taste, on texture, on sound, on the way an object felt when clamped between her jaws, but with the development of her bending, every sense seemed to pull together in jarring clarity, like splintered shards fit together to form a true picture of the whole. With her bending, _she_ was whole.

The earth caked her mouth, caked her skin, filled her ears with its sounds and her heart with its sturdiness. (And her eyes…) Her eyes were rendered unnecessary, because the earth beneath her bare feet allowed her to see better than anyone could ever imagine.

She was a slave to no limitation, dependent on no taste or texture of objects.

Toph Beifong was no longer in the darkness.


End file.
